The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
quote by Thomas Huxley
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.
quote by Arthur Bryant
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
He is the best general who makes the fewest mistakes.
He who asks the fewest favors is the best received.
He who asks the fewest favours is the best received.
Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts.
quote by Bethania McKenstry
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Public action should seek to expand the set of opportunities of those who have the least voice and fewest resources and capabilities.
quote by Paul Wolfowitz
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He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
quote by Walter Scott
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The Apple has the fewest bells and whistles. It has simple sound and few graphics special effects. In a way, that is a weakness because markets for the other machines are getting bigger.
quote by Bill Budge
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account.
quote by Richard R. Grant
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Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
quote by John Ruskin
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Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.
quote by Christian Nestell Bovee
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
quote by Jonathan Swift
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It makes sense for people who are good at fighting to go out and do it-because if they're good at it, that means the fewest number of other people die.
quote by Mercedes Lackey
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Football is a game of errors. The team that makes the fewest errors in a game usually wins.
quote by Paul Brown
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Unmethodical discourse at a café table
By the flickering candlelight
of the long evenings,
inimical to study so they said
they played this game
to while away the time
between learning and authority
in that Jesuit college
in the early 1600s:
blindfolded or simply shut-eye and don’t cheat
you turn the pages of the Latin dictionary at random
and stick a pin, in turn, upon a random word;
the first to make a sentence
in the fewest rounds, the fewest words, wins
a prize of choice..
we do not know the prize
(among those severe, repressed, ambitious
boys, perhaps it’s just as well…)
or what the others drew;
but this we know: that night
René pricked a first word – ‘sum’ – ah! -
promising! a verb was useful, in this game—
the second round… he pricked on ‘ergo’…
that swift mind already playing the tables
of his agile mind…
the air was tense; they’d remember
this night, this flickering light,
forever in their future lives…
a hush (how boys fight to win
more fiercely than Christ’s soldiers,
whom they would become…)
‘Cogito’! A shout of triumph
from our René – and the rest
is history – alas..
It’s said the Devil enters in
at the third stroke; and so it was:
in three words, a lifetime’s career
as the greatest of divines
in an age of awe for the divine
were lost to mere – philosophy…
the age of Clairvaux, Cluny, Chartres
for all too brief a moment,
saw the vision of a glorious revival; but...
triumphantly, our René shouts
‘Á moi, c’est la conquéte! Le jeu d’esprit á moi! ’
(impeccable Racinian hexameter, naturellement..) –
alas for human vanity! The gods were whispering
‘Sum, ergo cogito! ’ in his spiritual ear – but no –
his chose mankind’s so vain conceit
and launched a thousand thousand
café tables on the pavement; seated there
in black, with scarf and beret, sunglasses,
in a cloud of choking gitane and gauloise smoke,
centuries of self-satisfied philosophes,
believing 'cogito, ergo sum': that they are their thought; born
as true Frenchmen, to be world thinkers, Rodin-like; and
that because they think, they are… somebody…
oh René, what a fall was there...
poem by Michael Shepherd
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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